I hear the call of 'successful' middle-class life, and then I'm overwhelmed by poetry. I read some marvel of a poem, famous or not-so-famous, and I'm taken up in the interlacings of sound and beyond-what's-thought-of-as-sense, and in the shock of pleasure and knowing the poem imparts again and again. I look at my front room, and I realize that books of poetry are scattered everywhere. I go to my kitchen table, and my own papers are there, pages I've scribbled lines on, made notes on, gotten poems out whole and viable on. And I realize I can't turn away from this other call, this invitation to form a voice. Sometimes it's a whisper, sometimes an inchoate singing, sometimes a cry of hurt or ecstasy... and at all times I know that poetry is its only proper mode of expression. But not being able to turn away, and instead, able only to try to express at least something of this voice, to try to utter it in words, as if articulating desire itself, is a blessing and curse. Irving Layton, in one of his poems, refers to words as 'my friend the enemy.' That seems apt to me, I suppose all language both opens and closes sets of doors on reality. And poetry is is language at its most intense. So poetry draws poem-writers and poem-readers into paradoxes and problems on all sorts of levels. And then, invariably, or so it seems to me anyway, overwhelms them with a feeling of true revelling.
- Russell Thornton, from his "Notes on Writing" essay for Event Magazine (Spring 1999), as collected in 50 Years of Event Magazine: Collected Notes on Writing.
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